Breed V. Jones Case Study

In Breed v. Jones, Gary Steven Jones, a 17 year old juvenile, had a petition filed against him in the Los Angeles County Juvenile Court. This petition claimed that Jones committed acts while armed with a deadly weapon. Acts which would have been the crime of robbery if committed by any adult. The petition added that because of the acts, Gary Steven Jones was a person within the grasp of California Welfare and Institutions Code Section 602. A detention hearing was later held in which Jones was ordered to be detained until a jurisdictional hearing.
Fifteen days later after his original hearing, the court held another hearing in which it indicated that Jones was "not amenable to the care, treatment and training program available through the facilities of the juvenile court' under California Welfare and Institutions Code Section 707." At the end of the continuance hearing filed by Jones’s counsel, the court concluded that Jones was "unfit for treatment as a juvenile". The court also denied the petition, saying that Jones had not been tried twice because juvenile adjudication is not a "trial" and does not place a youth in jeopardy. As a result of this, his case was sent over to the adult criminal system. Jones, 17 years old at the time, stood before the judge in the criminal hearing and was found guilty of robbery in the first degree under California

Penal Code Section 211. The issue here was whether or not the waiver to criminal court violated the double jeopardy clause of the fifth amendment.
Thankfully for Jones, landmark cases such as In re Gault expanded the constitutional rights of juveniles. The Supreme Court stated in Gault that "neither the 14th Amendment nor the Bill of Rights is exclusively for adults alone,". This essentially included the Fifth Amendment. Such rights included; were the right to be given timely written notice of the hearing and the specific facts upon which the petition alleging delinquency is based, the right to be represented by counsel, the right against self-incrimination, and the right to confront and cross-examine the witnesses against him. The court concluded that, for purposes of the right to counsel, a "proceeding where the issue is whether the child will be found to be 'delinquent' and subjected to the loss of his liberty for years is comparable in seriousness to a felony prosecution."
In Breed v Jones, the U.S.

Supreme Court ruled that an adjudication in juvenile court is equivalent to a trial in criminal court when a juvenile is found to have violated a criminal statute. This meant that Jones had been placed in double jeopardy. The Court also emphasized that jeopardy applies at the adjudication hearing when evidence is first presented, not later. Waiver cannot occur after jeopardy is attached. Furthermore, the court found that juveniles should be afforded the same protection against double jeopardy as adults because they too may suffer the same anxiety and stress as any adult in the criminal

system.